Standing Tall on the Backs of Giants

Blender 2.80: The Latest Version Is Out, And More...

A lot of good stuff has happened in the Blender world since my last post, and this blog is all about some of those great things. And even while I was writing this, I received word of other great news for Blender, and had to stop writing to check those new things out and see if they were worth being included here.

What I found out blew me away, so had to download those special Blender builds and test them so I could make some videos of me trying out those new features. But, before we go to the eye candy part of this blog, let's talk about the recent big news that have made Blender users all over the world, more proud of our favorite DCC tool.

It is going to be a very exciting future for all of us, as the highly-anticipated new version of Blender has just been released. But before it came out, some big news from two well-known entities in the game development world were announced. It's safe to assume that most of you reading this blog who are also 3D artists, know who Epic Games and Ubisoft are.

But, for those who don't, both are some of the biggest game development companies in the whole world, with each having several best-selling game titles to their credit. And, you don't need to be a gamer or a rocket scientist to know that both are giant entertainment outfits with very deep pockets, as well as a lot of influence in the entertainment industry.

Epic Grants and A Major Studio Adoption for Serious Production

1.2 million American, an amount that you could truly call epic had you been lucky enough to win the lottery with such an amount for a prize. And, that's exactly the amount that Epic Games gave to the Blender Foundation, in support of Blender's ongoing development.

As if we Blenderheads couldn't take more, Ubisoft Animation Studio (UAS), the in-house studio of Ubisoft Film and Television dedicated to creating animated films and series, announced their decision to adopt Blender as their main digital content creation (DCC) tool, and also to actively help its development, as well.

With Epic's MegaGrant and Ubisoft joining hands with Blender as Corporate Gold sponsors, Blender's development fund is now at almost € 70,000 per month, or around 14 full-time paid developers. That infusion of cash is surely going to make all those developers work harder to make Blender better, faster, and more capable than it was before.

The Most Anticipated Feature of This New Version of Blender

The EEVEE Real-time Preview Renderer in Action

With Blender 2.80 finally out since last week, users all over the world didn't waste time creating artwork with it, and rendering them with a new renderer that's been making a buzz in the entire 3D/CGI industry the moment it was first introduced two years ago.

The new renderer is called EEVEE, which stands for Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine, is something that a lot of artists working in game development and virtual reality have been looking forward to having in Blender.

EEVEE is basically an OpenGL realtime preview renderer on steroids, giving game artists a means to preview their game assets within Blender and see how it would like like in a game, without needing to export them to other similar third-party tools, such as Marmoset, which offer a similar purpose.

Since it is a realtime renderer, it is incredibly fast. And that speed, coupled with its near photorealistic capabilities, have made it as a renderer of choice for even non-game artists and animators who are looking for a means to render their models and animations faster than Cycles, Blender's other, but more powerful renderer meant for TV and movie productions, and product visualization.